“The Book of Dave” (Bloomsbury USA), is about a London cabdriver who inadvertently founds a religion when a ranting diatribe he buries in the garden of his ex-wife is dug up five centuries later, in a now post-apocalyptic world, and becomes a sacred text. Mr. Self’s own text is immensely learned in cabbie lore and even creates a cab-based “Clockwork Orange”-like language, in which the sun is the “foglamp,” for example, and the moon an “édlite.”

Perfect! Also in the article: Self arrives at Kennedy Airport and walks to his hotel in Manhattan. (See the photo of him on the Brooklyn Bridge, with just a slim book bag.) He used to consume lots of drugs and alcohol, but now he walks a lot: "But I’m not addicted... I don’t need to score a walk." Well, maybe you'd walk the 20 miles from airport to hotel if you had the NYT personnel accompanying you, taking note of your every observation. But how could your observations be as good as Self's?

[H]e caught a whiff of subway. “Ah,” he said. “The afflatus of the city’s bowels — now we’re getting into the real body of the city.”

Mark Helprin, a novelist ("Soldier of the Great War", etc) engages in what he calls "straight line walking".

[url]http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/050545.html[/url]

[i]Ever since he was a small boy he has practiced what he calls “straight-line walking,” i.e., walking from one point to another as the crow flies, heedless of whatever obstacles may intervene—“through houses, ponds, and streams, trespassing, going through barns and places you shouldn’t be. I’d crawl through brambles and over rocks, slog through muddy, disgusting marshes and reeds, over railroad tracks and dams,” he says.

“Mostly people adjust their course to take the easy way,” he explains. “Something appealed to me to take the harder way. The reward would be that you have tremendous friction and texture; if you have to encounter all these things, you get wet, cold, muddy, and scraped. You learn, you feel, and you see —you do things you wouldn’t have done.” He says this straight-line walking may have given John Cheever, a neighbor in Ossining, the idea for his short story “The Swimmer,” in which a suburban husband returns to his house by swimming across the backyard pools of his neighbors.[/i]